Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim is almost entirely unknown, yet it is his most illuminating work. The Fortunate Pilgrim takes us to a world that has now disappeared. It is the squalid and desperate world of first and second generation Italian migrants in the bowels of early 20th century New York city.
The Fortunate Pilgrim tells the story of the bitter but rich lives of a desperately poor family which represents the reality of that experience. We see its lived meaning through the eyes of those who lived it. It is clear that Puzo is documenting this world – in such a way that its strange and different characteristics would not be forgotten as cultural and generational change rapidly swept it away. In such a way that the “other” disappears and we sit as silent observers at the kitchen table of the human lives that were traced out in this time and place in America.
Santa Lucia is the indomitable hero of this story – but around her are gathered children and neighbours. Carefully woven into its narrative, like archival notes, are realities that speak of their truth.
As we are introduced to Lucia we find her gathered with other women who had come like her from Italy – lamenting the behaviour of the young. The vast chasm between those who crossed the sea and their children who grew up in a new land is emphasised here as one of the prices paid in moving to a new country.
Poverty, like an unwelcome stowaway, stalks these families across the seas and it remains an ever-present reality – a lens through which they see the world. It was poverty that drove Lucia Santa to accept an unknown husband on the other side of the ocean. Poverty ensures her children are virtual wage slaves in the endless struggle for survival facing the family.
In the society from which they come anyone who climbs out of poverty knows it – and they jealously guard their new status (lest anyone pull them back into the common morass). Dr Barbato is one such. His father – poor like the other Italians who had arrived here – enriched on tenements leased to those that came across the seas with him, had educated his son and Dr Barbato considers himself a race apart. When he is called to Lucia’s apartment he is immaculately dressed. He frequents the opera. He lives in a different world than that inhabited by his poor patients. He resents having to under-charge the family because of its evident poverty. He is later outraged that the family send their daughter to the better hospital.
With poverty came its twin: unimaginable suffering. Lucia loses her first husband in an industrial accident. Later, her second husband loses his mind. He dies in a hospital for the poor. Later still, her child precedes her to the grave, but she is considered lucky.
But the human spirit has a way of transcending even the most difficult of circumstances. And so it is in the story Puzo weaves. Children play and rejoice. Lovers join lives together. Families still find richness in each other, and a community life flourishes in this far-away place. Villages are reborn in the human interactions of neighbours in the streets of New York. They cling to a model handed from generation to generation – the ancient wisdom of a people who have weathered many storms – until the young recognise the necessities of change and leave the old ways behind – as they must.
The old ways placed “father” – symbolically at centre of family life – to be obeyed (at least in theory) without question. But in this story, it is the matriarch who is at the heart of family life.
A copy of the Fortunate Pilgrim can be obtained here.